Providing Fault Tolerance to a Small Business

[jellc]

Here's what I want to do:

At the customers location, I want to have a host, with a VM running SBS 2008 server with Exchange 2007. I want to create a site-to-site VPN to a remote location where a second host resides. I want this second host to be passive and have an exact up to date VM of the SBS server and serve as a backup to provide the business with zero down time in the case of a hardware failure. Also in the case of a power failure at the customers location, the server at the remote location will still receive emails, so no emails are lost.

I need to know the VMware components I need to archive this and the bandwidth requirements for the WAN connection at both sites.

Thanks all input is greatly appreciated.

[lowteck]

this is not how fault tolerance is designed to be used.

what you are proposing is more along the lines of site recovery manager.

I would look into using HA for host failures and beefing up your ups on both you esx hosts and network infrastructure to weather power outages.

low

[DSTAVERT]

FT mirrors the running state of a VM but they both reference a single storage instance. Officially FT requires a 1GB connection.

[jellc]

Ok so FT is not what I need.

I need two hosts with different storage, at two different locations.

I want to provide the end user with no downtime for there email. When they are sitting on there PC's, if one host goes down, they are unaware of it in Outlook (Or only a few seconds of shortage).

I want to house the second host offsite, for security reasons (theft, fire, etc..)

[DSTAVERT]

You really aren't going to achieve what you need unless you had big bundles of cash available. There are software products that can do realtime replication of an active machine. Platespin is one such product but there are others. You would need to start the VM at the remote location. You will need to take care of things like DNS. The server is in an entirely different location and a totally different IP address. How are you going to redirect mail to the new location in spite of the fact that global DNS takes time to re orient itself. Internally, Outlook would probably choke on the new destination. I really have no idea how quickly you could bring your self back on line but I doubt it would be quick let alone instant. You have a lot of investigation and testing ahead of you.

[jellc]

Global DNS is not an issue for email. I can set priorities for the MX records.

I can achieve what I want with using replication from windows server. However, since they already have SBS 2008, which doesn't supporta CCR for exchange (continous cluster replication).

I'm trying to weight out my options with cost. Which ever is the cheapest route to achieve this is the way we are going.

Right now I'm looking at either a VMware solution, going through the headach of upgrading to MS Server Enterprise, or third party apps.

Since the server is already virtualized, it would make sense to take care of the HA on a lower level then the Application level. However, it greatly depends on cost.

Currently the setup is as follows:

- Site-to-site VPN between customers location, and remote location

- SBS 2008 server on ESXi 4.1 host at customers location

- Server 2008 Standard on ESXi 4.1 host at remote location

The Win Server 2008 standard is currently a member server with Exchange 2007. Active Directory, DNS, and the Global Catalog are both replicated without an issue and Network Load Balance (NBL) takes care of the Exchange Client Access Service (CAS), by issuing a virtual IP and DNS A record for Outlook. The only problem with this setup is when the primary server (SBS 2008) holding the mailbox database goes down, messages are held in queue on the member server until it comes back up.

The reason for this being, is that both server have different mailbox databases, and they are not replicated.

Any suggestions?

[lowteck]

please award correct or helpful answers .

thanks....

low

[DSTAVERT]

There isn't anytyhing in a VMware product that would directly give you continuous availability across a wan. There are products like Neverfail http://neverfailgroup.com/.

[Josh26]

You need to be realistic about something:

You have asked for an enterprise level business continuity solution

That this is described as being a "small business" running SBS will not prevent this from having an enterprise cost associated with it. If you are fine with that:

* Buy a SAN that supports multisite replication. I would recommend Lefthand for this purpose.

* Buy VMWare's Site Recovery Manager to manage the failover